A computer virus is an uninvited guest that can make your life miserable. For your system to get infected, all it takes is an unknowing mouse click on a link or an email attachment. The virus can rip through your system rather quickly, corrupting data, destroying files and make your system behave strangely. It can affect the overall performance of your system and some strong infections can make it completely inoperative.
Even if your computer is installed with latest virus defense software, todays virus are smart enough to deceive them and invade your system silently. However, an infected system will show many symptoms from which you can identify whether your system is infected with a virus.
The five common symptoms are:
1. Slow System performance: A smoothly working computer suddenly becomes extremely slow to perform basic operations indicating that there is something wrong. The reasons can be a malware attack or a hardware malfunction. You can check the hardware with the help of a Laptop repair or Computer repair professional and if hardware issues are not detected, you can confirm that the problem is caused by the existence of an active virus in your system. A virus, such as Trojan and worm are able to replicate themselves, and download additional spyware and virus in the background without your knowledge. This will eat up your system resources, eventually making it sluggish.
2. Frequent system crash: A virus can cause serious damage to the files stored in your computer. It can corrupt important system files, remove drives or modify administrative settings, affecting the proper functioning of the computer. If your system crashes or freezes repeatedly, you can assume that something has damaged its operating system, most probably a virus!
3. Automatically disabled antivirus and firewall: If you see any of your computer’s security components, such as antivirus and firewall has been disabled without your knowledge, it is a clear indication of a virus attack. The virus has somehow utilized the vulnerability in your system to invade it and disabled the security measures to allow the hacker to easily access your files and data. To prevent such incidents you should check your antivirus for proper functioning and update it frequently.
4. Unwanted hardware activity: Some hardware activities such as CD-ROM tray opening and closing by itself, unresponsive printer or USB devices, increased, or continuous hard drive activity indicates that some malicious activities are taking place in the background.
5. Unusual Error Messages: If you are continuously getting error messages that you have not seen before, most probably it is a virus attack. The messages indicating that your files cannot be opened, your application can’t run, or cannot access specific drives on your computer, it clearly indicates that those specific files are damaged by the virus attack.
Conclusion:
These are the most common symptoms indicating a virus infection on your computer. However, many malware does not show any detectable symptoms, making early detection quite difficult. Therefore, it is always recommended to install a reputed antivirus software and frequently update it to enable your system to defend against all existing and emerging virus.